Step 1: Capturing
Capturing is the process of getting the video footage from the mini-DV tape to your computer. The format on the tape is DV (digital video). Software editing is done in 3 types of formats: MOV (for Final Express on Mac), DV or MPG-1.
How is it done?
Plug in your camera to your computer. Start up your software. Somewhere in your software menu is the option you need to click that says capture or record.
Consumer-level software shouldn't be more complicated than that. It should work just like a tape recorder. Hit play on your camera. Hit record on your computer.
The better software packages will let you play your camcorder from the computer. Hit stop when you're done capturing (recording to your computer). You don't want to capture everything. View the footage first and capture just the parts you intend on using.
Prosumer software gives the option to mark and capture. This allows the user to watch the footage inside the software program and mark the sections you want captured. Then you can just push a button and come back in a few hours when the sections marked will be captured to individual editable files.
What to capture
You have to remember that video editing IS NOT capturing your entire tape into one big file and cutting out the parts you don't need. Editable video is very large and you'll find yourself running out of hard drive space very quickly.
Video editing is about capturing small little scenes and putting them together into a movie.
How long does capturing take?
Depends whether you have a capture card and the speed of your processor. A good capture card will let you capture in real-time. A one minute video clip will take one minute to capture.
If your software edits in MPG-1 format then the DV format from your camera has to be converted to MPG-1 format for your software. MPG-1 is a compressed format to make it smaller for harddrives without alot of space. Capture will take longer because it needs to record and convert.
DV format is around a 1 Gigabyte/minute. For 15 minutes we usually have 40 Gigabytes or 30-40 minutes of footage that we capture to pick and choose from.
What happens when I'm done capturing?
When you're done, you should have a bunch of video files anywhere from 3 seconds to few minutes that you'll drag and drop into the software timeline.